Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.

Recurring Dream and Apocalypse of Darkness

Important

At this point in the musical career of Japanese avant-noise guru Kawabata Makoto, he pretty much has carte blanche to give in to any and all of his extreme musical impulses. Anyone who has listened to his rough-hewn path through acid folk/space rock knows he has many. While his work with Acid Mothers Temple has veered both to the bucolic and the unsettling, it has always managed to tread through that middle ground. With “Eternal Incantation of Perpetual Nightmare” Kawabata sheds all pretense of serenity and delves right into metal.

The album consists of two 30+ minute tracks. The first one, “Eternal Invocation of Perpetual Nightmare,” is a tangle of guitar solos, howling feedback and a rumbling rhythm section that churns out a sound so abrasive there’s hardly a consistent melody to be found throughout its run-time. Almost hilariously, the instrument that comes closest to wrestling a tune out of the chaos is a flute, eking out folk flutters that barely register in the surrounding onslaught. It’s not music to pick apart minute-by-minute, but more something to let ebb and flow in the background, or deafening in the forefront.

The second track, “Recurring Dream and Apocalypse of Darkness,” takes the turgid, oozing gait of doom metal and stretches it out even further. The bass and drums move glacially and with purpose, pulling behind them lumbering, stoner metal grooves as bludgeoning as genre greats like Sunn O))) and Skullflower. As great as this homage to this subset of metal’s wide open spaces, Kawabata’s genius with this track comes via the ten-minute steady, though not quite piercing, drone that cuts in as the band falls out and carries the song to its conclusion. Having laid a 60-minute audio assault on the listener, this comparatively quiet send-off is just as sinister and ominous as all sounds preceding it. It’s thoroughly good stuff.

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